World fact of the day – most country’s populations are just a rounding error when looking at China.

Additional Chinese authorities fact of the day – I doubt they have misplaced something like 15% of their population, which is what roughly the population of Brazil is in Chinese terms. And then, actually reading the article, one sees that ‘nominal’ means this – ‘Chinese cities are divided between the nominal urban population (everyone who resides in urban areas) and official urban hukou residents (those with urban residence permits and access to full social services).’ Strange – one would almost think the Chinese are communist, following a pattern which would be familiar to anyone that remembers how East Berlin or Moscow used to be treated as ‘urban areas.’ Or that one has never heard the term ‘migrant worker’ in terms of China, and what this means in terms of official residency.

JaredSeptember 13, 2012 at 12:55 pm

I think this post hits right on. I’ve always thought the “is China building too many houses” debate as rather frivolous. The only important question is how does China transition away having two classes of citizens.

I have faith that the gov’t can restore macro stability in the face of a real estate bubble or some other “hard landing.” I have little faith that there is a plan for the hundreds of millions in the floating population.

Most of the world’s countries’ populations follow a general statistical trend. China and India are exceptions, an example of the King effect.

King effect.
In mathematical statistics, economics, and econophysics, the King effect refers to the phenomenon where the top one or two members of a ranked set show up as outliers. These top one or two members are unexpectedly large because they do not conform to a statistical distribution or rank-distribution which the remainder of the set obeys well.
Distributions typically followed include the power-law distribution, that of a stretched exponential, or a parabolic fractal.

The King effect has been observed in the distribution of: French city sizes, where the point representing Paris is the “King”, failing to conform to the stretched exponential and country populations, where only the points representing China and India fail to fit a stretched exponential. Note, however, that the King effect is not limited to outliers with a positive evaluation attached to their rank: For rankings on an undesirable attribute, there actually may exist a ‘Pauper effect’, with a similar detachment of extremely ranked data points from the reasonably distributed portion of the data set.